Skepticism

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Bad arguments are bad arguments

Amidst all the chaos of the self-proclaimed atheist leaders exposing their flaws, it’s easy to forget that they’re right about atheism. There is no god. The arguments for god are pathetic and silly. Many religious beliefs are self-destructive and poisonous. I’ve been seeing a few articles lately that are basically gloating that atheism is dead or dying because Richard Dawkins said something stupid about women’s equality…but they ignore the fact that he also said many smart things about god-belief, and the regressive nature of one guy’s antipathy towards feminism does not discredit atheism, or provide any comfort to religious advocates. It’s also particularly ironic when Catholics wag a finger at a few atheists who are blinded by privilege, while studiously ignoring that one of the biggest threats to women’s rights in the western world has been Catholic doctrine.

But as far as arguments for religions go, Dawkins doesn’t matter, and neither do the criminal activities of the Catholic church. What matters on the topic of god-belief are the qualities of the arguments. and really, they are appallingly bad. I’m not talking about just the goofy crap that comes out of lackluster minds like that of a Hovind or a Comfort, but the Big Guns of religion, like Aquinas. They are impossible to take seriously, unless one is doped to the gills with bad theology.

People often send me links from a site called “Intellectual Takeout” — there are a lot of Catholics who think I still need to be taken down a peg or two — and they are without exception absurd. The latest that was told would humble me is The Most Famous Proof for God’s Existence, which left me unimpressed. Here it is, in summary:

The “First-Cause Argument”:

– It’s impossible for a thing to be the cause of itself.

– If something is caused by another, then these causes must go back to infinity, or their must be a first, uncaused cause that begins the chain of causes in the universe.

– It’s not possible for causes to go back to infinity.

– Therefore, there must be a First Cause, which everyone calls “God.”

I have two problems with it.

The first is that I don’t know that their initial premise is true. Why can’t a thing be caused by itself, or better yet, have no cause at all? It’s simply an assertion, plopped down at the beginning of the argument, and it hasn’t been demonstrated.

The second is a related problem. What do you mean by “cause”? Just yesterday I was sitting down at a microscope, staring at high power at single cells, and seeing slow bubbling fluctuations in the membranes and the jittering activity of organelles, and also jerky movements of debris particles in the water, and I understood the cause: Brownian motion. This is simply the visible, random motion of ojects in response to collisions with the smaller atoms of water, which are all jiggling randomly with simple thermal energy.

Is that accepted as a “cause”? There is no intelligence behind it. Even if you accept some kind of determinism (I don’t), it’s not causal in the sense implied by Aquinas, who is reading some kind of planned purposefulness to it.

So is “God” just a form of heat?

It generally seems to be true that the deeper we look into things the simpler and more physical their causes appear. You might ask, “Why carbon?”, wondering why there’s so much of it here on Earth. And the physicists will tell you it all comes from nucleosynthesis in stars. Is nucleosynthesis “God”? Are stars?

So even if I accept their first premise, that all things are caused, I see no reason to believe that the primal trigger for all existence was an intelligent being with human-like personal qualities, like love and morality. Quite the opposite actually. This is an argument that leads me far, far away from the typical religious perspective of a deity, and closer and closer to an atheistic, scientific view of the universe.

In this sense, the religious apologists seem to be thrilled with internal dissent within the atheist community, because it is a useful distraction from the bullshit they’ve been peddling for a few centuries.

Comments

In this sense, the religious apologists seem to be thrilled with internal dissent within the atheist community, because it is a useful distraction from the bullshit they’ve been peddling for a few centuries.

You’d think they’d be staying very quiet and hoping no one notices that WE’RE making efforts to clean house and wonders what’s stopping THEM.

It’s impossible for a thing to be the cause of itself. Um, except for the First Cause, because Heit is special. Because, that’s why. (Just as First Causes don’t need a cause, this argument doesn’t need a justification!)

For people comfortable with an omni-whatever being, they sure are uncomfortable with infinity. If they’re positing that something kicked off the universe expanding from a hot, dense universe to the universe we have now, why not infinity?

At least in our universe, there seems to be a pattern of simpler things being the cause of more complex things. (Hydrogen is simpler than heavier molecules, which in turn are simpler than cells, which in turn are simpler than organisms.)

Thus, if there is a “first cause” of the universe, it should be very simple indeed.

The brain, which is the seat of intelligence, is one of the most complex things we know of. Thus, intelligence would seem to be a complex phenomenon.

Thus, it seems unlikely that a “first cause” would possess intelligence.

Since intelligence is one of the minimal attributes assigned to most concepts of “god,” it therefore follows that no god could be the first cause of the universe.

As far as I’ve ever gotten into discussing this with believers, the impression I get (and I am not claiming that I really understand them, ever) is that premise #1 is self-evident to them – because (I guess) they already believe in the Higher Power. Which is, of course, what they are trying to prove in the first place, making the “First Cause” argument a classic “begging the question” sort of argument.

God exists because there is no way to have cause wiithout God… it’s beyond circular, it’s a Moebius strip…

Sorry, prof, but if Dawkins is wrong about one thing, he has to be wrong about all other things. Including which tap is the hot one. Thus, I have converted to a creationist sect of fundamentalist christislamorastengriisikhindeobábuddhism. It’s the only logical decision to make.

PZ, I’m curious about your moral stances in relation to atheism. A good number of your posts have little to do with atheism or science (not that I’m complaining). If you were say a liberal Presbyterian in a parallel universe, would your non-atheist posts with regards to social justice be any different? I’ve read all your posts on “dictionary atheism” and I get all that. But identical rational social justice arguments are put forth by theists like Cornell West. Maybe you have discussed this before and could you provide me a link?

You might ask, “Why carbon?”, wondering why there’s so much of it here on Earth.

According to Wikipedia, 0.18% of Earth’s crust is Carbon. That’s much?
If a god wanted to give Earth lots of building blocks for life, why is its crust 27% Silicon and 8% Aluminum? Because he also likes computers and Coke cans?

…gloating that atheism is dead or dying because Richard Dawkins said something stupid about women’s equality
example of the ad hominem logical fallacy. Literally. (literal, not just euphemism). Claiming an argument is wrong because the same person said something else wrong, is itself a fallacy.
Related, also, is the label “category error”, just because {A} is wrong about category [X] does not mean everything {A) says about category [Z] is also wrong.
–
re 1st Cause arguments:
whenever presented with the reply of “if Gawd exists what caused him?”, the response will always fallback on “That’s what makes him God. Since he was an uncaused cause, what else could he be but God?????????”
A little more difficult to present them with uncaused events. Events requiring causes is such an inherent axiom that it is quite difficult to work around that.

ragdish @#9
Theists get their sense of social justice the same place atheists do – from their own empathy and consideration of Maslow’s hierarchy (or their lack of same), even if they won’t admit it. Psychopaths can be either theists or not, so their is no guarantee that either position will generate a socially conscious person. However, there are some theists who claim that their god demands that they be horrible to women, or gays, or some other groups, so by factoring them into the equation atheists come out slightly ahead in the contest for making moral persons (IMO).

“Mental things, brains, minds, consciousnesses, things that are capable of comprehending anything — these come late in evolution, they are a product of evolution. They don’t come at the beginning. So whatever lies behind the universe will not be an intellect. Intellects are things that come as the result of a long period of evolution.” (Richard Dawkins)

As you point out, the idea of whether God is simple or complex eventually comes down to whether the mind is simple or complex. Supernaturalism pulls on our folk intuition that mental things exist in some sort of magical, physics-free state of Being outside of natural and maybe even logical laws. Our thoughts are all first causes, originating from nowhere and existing everywhere — and God is then made in our image.

Well, to be fair, Aquinas did, in fact, define his terms fairly carefully – more or less that things don’t change unless acted upon by something else. Of course, our current understanding of quantum mechanics argues against that definition (nuclear decay, for example, is not caused by anything as such). And general relativity argues fairly strongly for a B-series understanding of time. So my problems with the argument are with #1 and #3 – both seem logically possible given what we know of reality.

Humans have proven to be terrible at extrapolating past the areas they have experience in. Round Earth, heliocentrism, continental drift, atomic theory, germ theory of disease, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics… all deeply counterintuitive and unexpected. When it comes to ‘the ultimate ground and nature of reality’, I’m not buying into any assumptions, no matter how intuitive, without some kind of evidence to back them up.

brucegee1962 #5 Nicely put.
The religious First Cause “argument” is question-begging from start to finish; I am not a physicist, but even I’ve at least heard of the concept of events (such as radioactive decay of any given atom) being uncaused.

I would like some comment on the following statement:
“The fact that all societies have believed in the supernatural for thousands of years gives it some credibility.” I was surprised to hear a psychology professor say this. He is a Christian. The obvious response is that there is a universal need for God/gods. Astonishing to me how the need for God affects reason.

By Odin’s beard dandruff, I do hate me some teleological argument. That people still make it in the year 2016 is depressing.

Putting aside that all of the premises are simply declared true without being demonstrated true, the conclusion relies on a completely useless definition of “god”. Assuming (and that’s all it is: an assumption) that there must be a first cause, why would that cause have to be a god? That word has an actual meaning to most people, and it’s not just “first cause”. Most if not all theists give at the very least the attribute of consciousness to gods, and nothing in the “proof” is demonstrated to require conscious will.

Even if a first cause were demonstrated to be necessary (thus far it is not), it would not imply the existence of a god (a word that implies a being, not just some primal event). And even if the existence of a god was otherwise demonstrated it would not require he/she/it to be the first cause (the god could have resulted FROM the first cause at a later point in time). The teleological argument doesn’t actually tell you anything one way or another when it comes to gods. It’s completely unrelated to the topic of gods unless you redefine “god” into completely useless terms that literally nobody uses in their daily lives.

See I’m at a place where I get both professional street-preachers (who get that most Christian-specific apologetics are PRATTs by now) trying to argue deism, as well as young student group people trying to trot out entry-level “Jerusalem is a real place so the bible is true” arguments.

My usual method is ignoring the former- my life is too precious to waste it arguing TAG against a guy with a sign saying “Repent or burn” – and giving as honest and calm a refutation as I can to the latter, because their life is too short to waste bothering other students with bad apologetics. At least I might convince them to be a little less droll.

This isn’t really related to the faulty arguments for god, but sort of related to the flaws in “new atheist leadership” or new atheist thought. And, I’m going to drag a well respected, but sort of second tier “new atheist”, through a bit of mud on this, but hopefully fairly.

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil–that takes religion.

I remember watching the “The Atheism Tapes” back when I was in the process of analyzing my beliefs on the road to atheism and hearing Weinberg say a similar thing on that program. The quote resonated with me. It explained why seemingly good religious people could do such horrible things. It reinforced by budding atheism; without religion I wouldn’t be one of those good people doing evil.

But, there are a couple of really rather insidious things wrong with this meme.

The first issue is that it reinforces the notion that human beings are either good or bad and ignores or hides the fact that human beings are just human beings, neither good nor bad, just human. To the extent we label a person good, we are blinding ourselves of their capacity to do evil things. And to the extent that a person is bad, we are denying their capacity to behave well. It’s dehumanizing and a rather infantile way to assess humans.

The second issue is that the quote implies (if it’s not directly stating) that religion is necessary for good people to do bad things. I don’t know any atheist who actually buys that literally, but it feeds into the “Yay, we good atheists are better than theists because religion makes those good theists do evil things!” pep rally cry. The simple fact is that religion is not necessary for “good people to do evil”. Simple ignorance can cause “good people to do evil” (although, Sam Harris would probably argue that since the intent was good, *this* evil isn’t as evil as somebody doing the exact same evil thing without ignorance). The quote also implies that only bad atheists do evil, but, disregarding the first issue with good vs bad people, then how do we identify bad atheists? How does one know that they aren’t a bad atheist? And how is this any different from Christian A claiming that a Christian B who did something evil isn’t a real Christian because real Christians don’t do evil things?

Apologies if this isn’t really on track, but this has been bugging me for a while now. And all of that said, I think Steven Weinberg has done a lot of good for humanity that outweighs my concern about this quote.

…more or less that things don’t change unless acted upon by something else. Of course, our current understanding of quantum mechanics argues against that definition (nuclear decay, for example, is not caused by anything as such).

Our current understanding argues no such thing. Alpha decay is caused by quantum tunneling, and beta decay (and muon decay, etc) is caused by the weak interaction. That we can’t predict when a particular decay happens hardly qualifies calling it ‘uncaused’. An initial state still precedes a final state, which is all that causation requires, no? To predict the time would entail determinism.

And on the the first-cause argument, I’ve never seen how an uncaused cause is any less absurd than an infinite chain of causes or why an infinite chain of causes can’t also be called god. In other words, the argument is equivalently silly if you change the final premise to be “An uncaused cause not possible.” and the conclude with “Therefore, there is an infinite chain of causes, which everyone calls “God.””

And on the the first-cause argument, I’ve never seen how an uncaused cause is any less absurd than an infinite chain of causes or why an infinite chain of causes can’t also be called god. In other words, the argument is equivalently silly if you change the final premise to be “An uncaused cause not possible.” and the conclude with “Therefore, there is an infinite chain of causes, which everyone calls “God.””

Yep, and there are in fact people that will argue that. Hell, I’ve heard MORE people argue that God has simply “always existed” than argued that he suddenly popped into existence out of nowhere.

Tabby @27
See, I like to use Lord of The rings. After all, middle earth is just this world at an earlier state of time, and we know earth exists. The intro says that the books are based of a manuscript Tolkein translated out of a proto-english hobbit book. Sure, we don’t have any originals, but we don’t have any originals of the bible either!

Anyone that doubts the historical veracity of LoTR just has the presupposition that stories with Elves aren’t true! Therefore, I’m justified in worshipping the Elven pantheon.

Deacon Duncan (http://freethoughtblogs.com/alethianworldview/) did bunches of posts where he talks about the absurdity of the first cause argument, which actually goes back to a much more fundamental premise: Speaking of cause and effect before the beginning of the universe is inherently absurd, because without the universe, cause and effect do not exist. Trying to figure out what caused the universe is then fruitless, because to make the argument, we must presuppose there is some metauniverse that includes at least the attribute of causality within which our universe was “caused”, and we push the question back to how that metauniverse came to exist (or “why” it exists, or some other formulation that isn’t an absurdity when causality is removed).

Zeus exists. Vishnu exists. Yaweh exists. Babdh, Bel, Morrigan exists. (Celtic gods always come in threes, don’t ya know.)
All gods exist. Most certainly. They exist in the imagination of those who worship them. I have not yet seen any conclusive empirical proof that gods of any sort exist outside of people’s imaginations. Even so-called holy books are just the written form of someone’s imagination at work.

Even if we accepted your assertion that the universe MUST have a beginning, there’s no reason to assume it was a god.
Even if we accepted that it was a god, there’s no reason to assume it was the Christian god.
It didn’t work for William Lane Craig, and it’s not going to work for you.

Rob Grigjanis – I didn’t say that nuclear decay had no cause. What I was pointing out is that its cause is not compatible with Aquinas’ understanding of causality. In Aquinas’ terms, a match has the potential to burn, but won’t actually burn unless something acts upon it to bring forth that potential.

I’m pointing out that nuclear decay is demonstrably not like that. An atomic nucleus has the potential to decay, but nothing outside the nucleus acts upon it to cause that decay. There is no way, even in principle, to predict when such spontaneous decays might happen, except statistically. A particular U-235 atom spontaneously fissions at a particular time… because it does at that time. Nothing external to the atom causes it to decay, nor – so far as we currently understand QM – are there ‘hidden variables’ that govern when it decays.

(Just to be excessively pedantic, note I’m specifically talking about spontaneous decay, not capture events like in a fission reaction.)

I think “cause” and “effect” thinking, while handy and often useful, is also somehow suspicious, as Hume pointed out I believe. I think “A caused B” is just another way of saying that A and B were really part of a larger event. We isolate them in thought for the purpose of thinking about them, but in actuality, as opposed to in thought, they are not “separate”. “A” happened to be an earlier part of the event than “B” was.

But “A” cannot be said to have caused “B” simply because it happened first. We have to show that the two events are connected, but if they are connected then they can be considered together as a larger event.

But the universe as a whole must be “uncaused” whether there is a “God” or not, since by definition the universe is all that there is and if there is a God that god is by definition a part of all there is. Since there is nothing outside of “all that is” then there is nothing to “cause” it. Rather than say it caused itself I prefer to say that causality is an idea that does not apply here. The Universe is neither caused nor not caused. Here we all are.

@25 RG: “That we can’t predict when a particular decay happens hardly qualifies calling it ‘uncaused’.”
Of course it qualifies. It’s just a matter of reformulating – and if apologists can do that, so can we.
There is no cause for a radioactive atom decaying on moment X iso moment Y.
And that refutes the premisse that everything must have a cause.

The cause argument fails as a fallacy of composition. The foundation is the idea that everything in the universe is an effect of a cause, which is their “evidence” that the universe itself must have a cause. Even if we were to grant, for the sake of argument, that everything in the universe has a cause the argument fails because it attributes the attributes of parts of the set to the set itself.

For example:

1. No individual part of a plane is capable of flight. Not the nuts and bolts, not the plastics, mechanisms, fuels, fabrics – not a single part of it. (Nothing in the universe can exist without a cause.)
2. Therefore, a plane cannot fly. (Therefore, the universe must have a cause.)

Nothing external to the atom causes it to decay, nor – so far as we currently understand QM – are there ‘hidden variables’ that govern when it decays.

Of course it qualifies.

I don’t know, maybe its just semantics, but there is certainly a Hamiltonian that can be said to cause the decay. The nucleus decays because it is energetically favorable for it to do so, and nature provides the Hamiltonian links the initial and final states. Protons do not decay (perhaps) because there is no similar cause. I agree with Rob Grigjanis.

It occurs to me that there may be a more accurate way to define the “dictionary atheists”: atheist fundamentalists. They’re increasingly showing all the same misogyny, tribalism, xenophobia, and slavishness to the status quo of fundamentalists of any religion. I’m sure I’m not the first to point it out.

In a way, we atheists should have seen it coming. After all, if religions are just flawed human creations, then the same flaws that religions have can easily show up anywhere.

I’d comment more on the actual topic of the post, but I’ve gotten to a point where I feel like the argument over whether or not God/gods exist has been exhausted. Pro-God arguments always seem to be twisty logic puzzles designed to confuse into submission, rather than actual reasons to believe. They’re mazes that lead nowhere, and the only reward for solving them is denial and shifting goalposts. I keep feeling like there are more important things I could be doing than playing along over and over again.

I first heard that quote from Hitchens – no idea what the original source was.

I used to find it compelling, and it sort of enjoyable in so far as it will shut up a yammering god botherer pretty quickly. It just isn’t factually sound.

For example, another dynamic that creates that effect really well – getting people who believe they are acting righteously to do the most horrific things – is nationalism. The obvious example would be the Nazis, many of whom believed their whole lives that they were fighting to liberate Germany and Europe from the scourge of socialism and the Bolsheviks, but really any war will do just fine. Think of what good, decent people have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan because of their belief in our national system.

Of course, you then get the argument that goes something like, “Well, nationalism is just another form of that religious psychology – unquestioning belief, yada, yada.” Maybe so, but that’s another way of undermining the “religion as a unique force of evil” narrative. It really is an example of muddy, unclear philosophy. It’s as sloppy as arguments that hold atheism responsible for the destruction caused by Stalin and Mao.

what I do not like about that kind of argument stems from who it is heard from.
I do not have any problem of “speculating ” about first causes the abstract thinking is stimulating and new insights are possible. The problem comes with the fact that they make a mighty jump to the conclusion of jesus and the bible from that and it always boils down to because he claimed to be god it says so right here on page so and so in this here book!
At which point I realize that they are sleep walking or “whistling past the graveyard” and not really interested in thinking at all just trying to get me to accept what they are selling.

Bill Buckner@40 – Again, I’m not saying nuclear decay is uncaused. I’m saying that the way it is caused is not compatible with “Aristotelean-Thomistic” philosophy. And since the “first cause” argument depends critically on that philosophy, it is reason to be doubtful of the argument.

Of course, you then get the argument that goes something like, “Well, nationalism is just another form of that religious psychology – unquestioning belief, yada, yada.” Maybe so, but that’s another way of undermining the “religion as a unique force of evil” narrative.

I think the usual counter to the objection that people ‘who believe they are doing righteously do horrible things’ for non-religious reasons too is that — in principle — nationalism, politics, pseudoscience, etc. are all supposed to be supported by worldly evidence and reasons which stand up to critical scrutiny. They’re supposed to make sense. This makes the beliefs vulnerable and places their adherents on the same ground as the critics. If they’re lies or mistakes then the hope is that there’s only so long before that will eventually catch up to them.

Religion, on the other hand, emphasizes special revelations and mystical knowledge which are supposed to go beyond what people in the world can figure out rationally. Lies can’t necessarily be caught out because it’s all based on ‘spiritual’ truths. If necessary, a lack of credible evidence or encouraging results can easily be promoted as a virtue. The wise see with the eyes of faith.

Religion is unique in that it entrenches dogma proudly AS dogma. At least an opponent who is denying they’re faith-based and dogmatic is theoretically reachable.

When a muon decays to a teacup, I’ll be happy to call the event uncaused.

I think you’d need more than a muon for that. If some conservation law or another were violated, would that mean it’s uncaused, or would it mean that there might be a supernatural/miraculous cause that doesn’t care about conserving such things (or that the law in question isn’t quite as lawlike as we thought it was)? I guess if this supernatural thing is infinitely powerful, it would need to be awfully delicate to avoid making the universe explode…. unless it wanted to do that.

Hume liked to say that there’s a “constant conjunction” of two events. You see A, and you reliably see B later, time and again, so you say A causes B, because you infer from the conjunction of your two sets of experiences that they have a “causal” sort of relation with each other. But it’s not as if you ever actually see anything like “causes” themselves — those are theoretical entities that do the job of relating two types of (empirical, observable) events, not substantial things or properties of things. Plus, we have no experience of “all reality before the universe (and perhaps a god) existed, if there was anything” nor are causal relationships ever used to describe the entirety of the natural world (only one part with another), so on several different levels it makes no sense to think you could just deduce anything like that, presumably by pulling lots of wacky assumptions out of your ass.

Aquinas’ metaphysics does rely on Aristotle, including ideas like impetus theory. Try explaining momentum to a theist using a first cause argument, to see if they actually believe Jesus has to push particles around lest they stop moving (and spends his time doing just that), since their claim is basically that inertial motion is logically impossible. (They’d at least need to say Aristotle’s physics is somehow good enough and admit that it can’t logically handle simple crap like this.) We wouldn’t say that a projectile’s motion is uncaused, but we would say nothing extra (like a god, the wind behind it which is displaced by the bullet, or anything else for that matter) needs to be pushing on it, in order for it to simply continue moving. So, even if anybody were somehow in the position of treating the entirety of the natural world (including everything its past, however long that may be) as if it were one experience in a sequence of experiences, which occurs regularly (they also know creation happened regularly, nor just more than once??), it’s not clear why anything extra would need to be “pushing” it in some metaphorical sense or another. Anyway, if we don’t need it for the parts (and have much better theories without it), and it’s not even appropriate or coherent to do it with the whole, then the argument is just a lot of pointless, confused, extremely outdated garbage.

First cause arguments also reduce to ontological ones, and there’s no reason why we can’t consistently say that The-Existing-And-Necessary-First-Cause-That-Must-Be doesn’t exist, isn’t necessary, wasn’t first, didn’t cause anything, etc….. Theists think those kinds of assertions have some kind of logical force behind them, which you’d have to be a fool to deny, but they don’t. That such arguments also wouldn’t establish a personal theistic deity (if they established a first cause, which they don’t do), much less their favorite flavor of a personal theistic deity in particular, is just icing on the cake. It’s usually a huge waste of time to even try to clear up most of this with them, because they have lots of unrelated prior commitments to their religion (their denomination, and the particular community they belong to within it) which has nothing at all to do with ancient sophistry that they’re evidently not even going to take seriously enough to analyze or research. But if they want to insist that their theological beliefs aren’t just faith-based or confusion-based but really are intellectually defensible, it can be helpful to understand why that’s not so.

The quote resonated with me. It explained why seemingly good religious people could do such horrible things. It reinforced by budding atheism; without religion I wouldn’t be one of those good people doing evil.

That whole nonsense relies of course, on the unstated premise that good and evil are intrinsic qualities of a person largely disconnected from their actions. Which gets us to “but he’S a good guy, he would never rape, therefore this woman must be lying”.
I personally think that Samwise Gamgee had it right: pretty is who pretty does. If you help little old ladies with their groceries it doesn’t matter much if you’re doing it because you believe that some god will reward/not punish you in the afterlife or because you think that it’s the right thing to do because it’s much easier for you than for the little old ladies. In the end it’s doing something good.

To my eyes, Aquinas’ reasoning is an intellectuel fossil. It’s a remnant of a time where philosophy was didn’t require the painstaking explicitation of every term and concept that is used, but could rely on everyday, intuitive words and thoughts. “How do I know?” the great man would have said about his false premise. “But everybody knows this!” He might have added “Just look around you” and given a perfectly non-pertinent example. “What do I mean by cause?” he would have said. “But you know what a cause is as well as I do, there’s no need to say more!”

The main problem I have with arguments like Aquinas’ is not their special pleading, or the leaps of logic, or the non sequiturs (although each one of these issues separately suffices to invalidate them). No, what gets me worked up is that they are rationalizations, fancy ways to reach a conclusion one has already accepted for reasons entirely unrelated.

Here’s the thing: NO ONE, and I mean absolutely no one, has come to believe in God because of the First Cause argument, or even the argument from Design, which Dawkins erroneously thinks has been the most influential one. Instead, people believe in God for various social reasons, mainly because a lot of other people have believed in God (which is what all arguments from scripture boil down to). For such a person, an argument like Aquinas’ provides a welcome justification of the fundamentals of their belief (“It’s common sense that there is a God! Everyone can see it!”), and they can then fill in the rest. That is how we get from “First Cause” or “Prime Mover” to Jesus Almighty — because of course the First Cause is MY God, because who else could it be?

But for a non-believer, the argument is vacuous, because it’s vacuous in isolation even to the believer, they just don’t realize. If it were a compelling argument for God, then why does Jesus not use it in the Gospels? It’s not that complicated, it’s not even that modern — it was lifted almost wholesale from Aristotle’s reasoning! But of course, Jesus was preaching to people who all took it for granted that (at least a) God existed, and his whole effort was to convince them about the “right” kind of God.

In Aquinas’ terms, a match has the potential to burn, but won’t actually burn unless something acts upon it to bring forth that potential.

You also wrote

nothing outside the nucleus acts upon it to cause that decay.

But, as I said, that is just wrong. A simple example is the decay of an excited atomic state. We don’t just have an excited atom with nothing acting on it. We have an atom plus the ground state of the electromagnetic field. That is what is acting on the excited state, and rendering it unstable. And the decay rate is calculable based on this*.

If Aquinas would have insisted that you be able to calculate when it decays, that is another matter. But your “nothing acts on it” is simply wrong.

So saying that other notions of causality make sense of spontaneous nuclear decay is true, but not relevant.

I don’t understand what’s relevant about nuclear decay. Nearly every time anybody is talking about causes of events in our experience, it has nothing to do with nuclear decays. Of course we’d be in a significantly different universe if there were no such things, so in manner of speaking everything depends on the fact that there are nuclear decays or a weak interaction. However, moving my fingers as I type this sentence (as opposed to being caused to do anything else) won’t be explained at any level, except in extremely bizarre circumstances, by citing the decay of any nucleus anywhere. So even if it’s valid counter-example to Aquinas’ understanding of “causality” (although it’s not clear in what sense he actually ruled it out), it doesn’t seem relevant to bring it up in this context.

Ray Ingles, from your link:

Feser’s… argument seems to boil down to saying, “Just because we can’t find a cause for quantum phenomena doesn’t mean there isn’t one.” … Thing is, Bell has shown that you can’t have local unknown variables in quantum events. Bohm’s interpretation would give you the possibility of unknown variables (thus taking out the random, seemingly acausal, aspect), but at the price of locality (in short, such variables would be global, and not tied to a specific location; so you lose any predictability, anyway).

You can’t buy your way out of nonlocality by paying the cost of indeterminism and/or acausality. That’s not how it works, and that’s not at all what Bell proved. Every quantum theory (or any theory that improves on it somehow) has to be nonlocal in order to (at a minimum) explain entanglement, which is just an observed fact.* I have no idea how that might relate to Scholasticism, but interestingly enough, it does (or should) have implications about ordinary notions of causality: what’s required of a cause-effect relationship, whether it’s always necessary to talk about causation in a certain way, etc.

I’m really confused by this description of de Broglie and Bohm’s theory. The “hidden variables” that people talk about are simply the positions of particles (or field values, if you like), branded as “hidden” just because “quantum states” don’t specify definite values of positions at all times. In one sense, it’s very misleading to call them hidden, because you don’t see abstract stuff like the wavefunction or the quantum state, whereas a person who isn’t blind can with no effort see that there are things with positions in space, which (you can very reasonably suppose) are composed of other things like particles. Nor do you ever actually see something like a dead cat in a superposition with a live cat — that’s what’s actually hidden from observation, despite the confusing terminology that is mostly just meant to be derogatory or to make Bohmian mechanics sound somehow suspicious or scientifically inappropriate. In any case, the position of something like a particle is obviously not a global thing. However, the law of motion for these localized objects shows what is manifestly nonlocal about the theory: the position of one depends on the positions of all of the others. This is entirely in agreement with any other theory of quantum mechanics (indeed, it was specially cooked up to guarantee that, because Bohm was no slouch and knew what he was doing).

Saying “you lose predictability, anyway” is a curious statement. It’s a fact that this is a deterministic theory — you can’t sort of squint at it and pretend it’s an indeterministic theory by saying that we don’t know everything about everything everywhere. If you took Laplace’s conception of determinism as a simple or primitive example, he wasn’t claiming that we know the exact initial conditions or that we know the final and exact laws of motion (in order to potentially determine states at every other time, past or future). But he was claiming that if you did know such things, if you were omniscient about it so to speak, then in that sort of a world which has deterministic laws, you could calculate what any state would be given any other state. That’s just what it means to say that the world (not your theory or your knowledge, but the world) is deterministic. If we don’t live in the sort of world which behaves according to (or is describable by) deterministic laws, then it follows that a deterministic theory is going to make the wrong predictions or retrodictions, because the world doesn’t work that way. But if we just don’t have some information, that implies nothing at all about what the world is actually like or whether a deterministic theory is correct.

*With the possible exception of Many-Worlds, only because Bell implicitly made the routine assumption that an experiment has an outcome once it is done. If experiments yield a large variety of results in different worlds… well, then that sort of theory may be nonlocal too, but Bell’s argument can’t prove anything about it. It’s not even clear what it might mean to talk about correlations between events, whenever there is entanglement, that happen in different worlds… But how the branching-of-worlds happens is presumably nonlocal, because you get a whole universe, all at once. It’s not an effect that propagates from one local region to another, through spacetime, according to every Many-Worlds advocate that I’m aware of. Anyway, it’s not like Many-Worlds people should be disagreeing with Bell’s proof (meaning it’s a literal mathematical impossibility that a local theory gives the correct statistics) or with the numerous experimental results since that have tested (and confirmed) it observationally. They’re just in their own weird little corner of logical space, and have to deal with these issues somewhat differently if they’re going to stick with their story.

But how the branching-of-worlds happens is presumably nonlocal, because you get a whole universe, all at once. It’s not an effect that propagates from one local region to another, through spacetime, according to every Many-Worlds advocate that I’m aware of.

Funny, where I’ve seen this discussed, it is local; decoherence occurs locally, and the effect propagates outward at the speed of light, maximally. Can you cite the MWers who say otherwise?

It’s not even clear what it might mean to talk about correlations between events, whenever there is entanglement, that happen in different worlds

It’s as clear (or unclear) as it is in any interpretation. If measurements along the same axis of two parts of a singlet spin state are made at points A and B with a spacelike separation, there are only two possibilities determined by the preparation (and subsequent correlation); (A+, B-) and (A-, B+). In MW, the (A+) expanding world can only meet the (B-) expanding world, because it’s already orthogonal to the (B+) world. See Section 6.3 here (this also has local splitting points).

Funny, where I’ve seen this discussed, it is local; decoherence occurs locally, and the effect propagates outward at the speed of light, maximally.
[…]
In MW, the (A+) expanding world can only meet the (B-) expanding world, because it’s already orthogonal to the (B+) world.

I’ve never heard that. I don’t get it, but maybe the people you’ve seen discussing this are the ones who are confused (maybe both).

If branching is local (and propagates at the speed of light via a mechanism like decoherence), what would there be in reality which makes it the case that “it’s already orthogonal” to the other world, which hasn’t yet gotten the message that is supposedly being propagated and is supposedly capable of explaining this? How does it know, before it gets there, that it can’t expand to “meet” the wrong sort of expanding world? (Or what makes it the case that the other one, already, knows which one it should be, ahead of time?) If they’re separated, and you’re not measuring or interacting with B let’s say, then how does decoherence explain B being snapped instantly into the correct state, or if not instantly before anything like an expansion or lightspeed propagation or whatever has time to get there? This seems to imply that the correlation is determined by conditions at the time of preparation (at the source, in the past light cone of both), but I’m pretty they don’t want to say that, so what are they really saying?

Besides, where in their equation does it imply anything except an instantaneous change of both parts of the entangled state, however far apart they may be? They really like their equation, which they say is always simple and always right and always does the same deterministic thing in all circumstances, and they seem unwilling to mess it up by adding any fuzzy exceptions or extra rules to it.

In any case, whatever I may or may not get about that, we’re dealing with something else when we talk about worlds (and their spacetimes) being created constantly by some process or another, and I don’t know what could be meant by saying it’s local. A whole new set locations is being made, somewhere else and who knows where that is, so however that’s supposed to happen, it’s not “local” in the sense of something moving or propagating from one location to another nearby location, to another and another, all within the same spacetime (in the same branch of the universe). What’s meaningful about the statement that QM is nonlocal (according to single-world theories) is the phenomena in question happen in spacelike separated locations in the same spacetime, so you can say what that separation is or how light (or anything else) moves through it, in spatial and temporal units. How far apart are the universes in many worlds supposed to be, and in what sense does something move “locally” from one to the other? No idea. You have to be changing the subject or saying something very different, if you need to relate one spacetime to another.

maybe the people you’ve seen discussing this are the ones who are confused

*shrug*. When I’ve seen propagation of branching discussed, this is what I’ve seen. I’m just giving my semi-informed response to your semi-informed comments. I’d still like to know which MWers think branching is instantaneous.

what would there be in reality which makes it the case that “it’s already orthogonal” to the other world

The wave function of the prepared state is something like

(|+>|-> – |->|+>)/√2

|+> and |-> are orthogonal in each Hilbert space. That’s it.

If they’re separated, and you’re not measuring or interacting with B let’s say, then how does decoherence explain B being snapped instantly into the correct state, or if not instantly before anything like an expansion or lightspeed propagation or whatever has time to get there?

Then there is no splitting at B, until the A worlds hit it.

This seems to imply that the correlation is determined by conditions at the time of preparation (at the source, in the past light cone of both)

How else do you think the correlation is determined?

where in their equation does it imply anything except an instantaneous change of both parts of the entangled state, however far apart they may be?

It’s special relativity, which is explicitly in relativistic quantum physics. Nothing I do here and now (pour milk in my tea, measure a particle’s spin, etc) can affect anything outside the future light cone of that event.

For further clarification, you should talk to an actual MWer. I’m shutting up now, and calculating after lunch.